I was already smiling in anticipation.

“I’m afraid not, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “The Colonel has given orders for the house to be left as is. Those are the wishes of the film people.”

“Oh, bother the film people!” I said, perhaps too loudly. “They can’t keep us from having Christmas.”

But I saw at once by the sad look on Dogger’s face that they could.

“I shall put up a little tree in the greenhouse,” he said. “It will keep longer in the cool air.”

“But it won’t be the same!” I protested.

“No, it won’t,” Dogger agreed, “but we shall have done our best.”

Before I could think of a reply, Father came into the kitchen, scowling at us as if he were a bank manager and we a group of renegade depositors who had somehow managed to breach the barriers before opening time.

We all of us sat with eyes downcast as he opened his London Philatelist and turned his attention to spreading his charred toast with pallid white margarine.

“Nice fresh snow overnight,” Mrs. Mullet remarked cheerily, but I could see by her worried glance towards the window that her heart was not in it. If the wind kept blowing as it was, she would have to wade home through the drifts when her day’s work was done.

Of course, if the weather were too severe, Father would have Dogger ring up for Clarence Mundy’s taxicab—but with a stiff winter crosswind, it was always touch and go whether Clarence could plow through the deep piles that invariably drifted in between the gaps in the hedgerows. As all of us knew, there were times when Buckshaw was accessible only on foot.

When Harriet was alive, there had been a sleigh with bells and blankets—in fact, the sleigh itself still stood in a shadowy corner of the coach house, behind Harriet’s Rolls-Royce Phantom II, each of them a monument to its departed owner. The horses, alas, were long gone: sold at auction in the wake of Harriet’s death.